Deep Focus seeks to create a body of content that inspires thinking about design and representation.

Category Archives: photography

In a digital age, photographers Alex Hammond and Mike Tinney have created a series of photographs commemorating the traditional tool of the architect: the pencil. The images feature extravagant mechanical pencils, simple knife sharpened pencils, and the tooth-marked set of yellow pencils owned by artist David Shrigley. World famous architect Thomas Heatherwick’s pencil is embedded in an ornamental metal grip.

The images have been collected in a book titled “The Secret Life of the Pencil,” available from publisher Laurence King.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology provides 4 free architecture courses online. The courses cover landscape, urbanism, photography, and the production of space. These courses are easily accessible and available to all. The courses are offered for undergraduate and graduate students and they are in many languages including English, Spanish, and Portuguese.

Walter Mittelhozer was a pioneering aviator and the co-founder of Swissair. He photographed many cities in the Middle East and Africa. Mittelholzer always flew with a co-pilot so that he could photograph from the air. A new book, published by Scheidegger & Spiecss documents his ariel shots.

Google Chrome has devised a new way to get to know our planet. Through doodling a curve onto its interface, Land Lines reveals a corresponding landform, along with its physical location. This is an application that allows users to happen upon parts of the world to which they would otherwise be oblivious.

Rich McCor’s photographs with inserted silhouette cut-outs inspire thoughts about scale and composition. His Instagram profile is composed of images that take recognizable artifacts from our environment and transform them through simple superimposition. The final product tends to be humorous and refreshing—take a look!

Photographer Camilo Jose Vergara has spent the past forty years photographing decaying buildings in low-income American neighborhoods in his project titled “Tracking Time.” Vergara’s image sets reveal the life span of several buildings as they decline, are demolished, or are restored. The photographs reveal both gradual and drastic changes in the built environment, showing how social and economic factors impact the world we live in. In some cases, Vergara documented entire streetscapes, illustrating the loss and change low income communities face.

A homemade camera created by placing 32,000 straws in a wooden box results in beautifully abstract, pixelated photographic images. The camera, which was first created in 2007 by Michael Farrell and Cliff Haynes, turns each straw into a miniature camera that projects an image onto photo-sensitive paper. The image formed by each straw comes together to create large, intricate photographs. Because each straw is slightly different, the resulting images have an ethereal, disorienting atmospheric quality.

Is your DSLR a mystery to you? Photography-Mapped, an interactive website by designer Simon Roberts, illustrates how the parts of a DSLR camera move together to form an image. By manipulating the controls on the website, users can test out their knowledge of aperture, shutter speed, light, and ISO. When the controls have been set, users press the “take photo” button to check whether or not their exposure is satisfactory. The simple graphic on the site allows new photographers to understand the basic mechanics of their camera.

A Portland police officer looked out his window one evening to the sight of thousands of black starlings settled on the tops of snow-covered trees. Walker Berg, the C.S.I. who noticed the birds, quickly grabbed his DSLR to photograph the stunning site. The police department named the image Crows on Snow and posted it to social media.

O N E E V E R Y O N E, a new photographic series by artist Ann Hamilton commission by Landmarks, will adorn the halls of the Dell Medical School in Austin. O N E E V E R Y O N E explores the relationship between human touch and caring, using frosted plastic to obscure parts of the subject that aren’t directly touching the material. More than 530 Austin-area participants were photographed for the project, which opens on January 26. Opening celebrations run from January 26-28.

Photojournalist Michael Hanson’s images of Amish communities give insight to the rural, low-tech life of the religious order. Hanson’s work focuses primarily on people who produce food, which led to his interest in photographing Amish farmers and homemakers. The images show the everyday life of the Amish, from mornings harvesting tomatoes to an afternoon at a livestock market. The images reveal the contrast between the Amish and the rest of the country; although the images invoke a sense of community, they also portray the isolation experienced by some people who chose to leave the religion.

OldNYC is a new app that allows tourists and locals to explore New York City through the eyes of those who came before them. Creators Orian Breaux and Christina Leuci geotag photographs obtained from the New York Public Library’s Picture Collection allowing users to access historic images as they are walking through the city. OldNYC enables the past to intersect with the present, revealing to the user the layers of history embedded in the cityscape. The app is free on iTunes here.

Post navigation

About

The School of Architecture Visual Resources Collection (VRC) curates image content available to faculty and students at The University of Texas at Austin. For more information about the VRC's full complement of resources and services, please visit our website.